Treen, West Cornwall — November
The barn sat at the end of a lane that had no business being called a road. Marta’s hire car scraped gorse on both sides, the branches clawing at the paintwork like something trying to pull her back. She had forgotten how narrow everything was here. How the land refused to accommodate machinery. How the sky seemed to press down on the granite as if testing it.

When it left, it left as it had come, through the same breach in the same levee, though weary now and sluggish from its rampage. It left like the marauding creature they now knew it had been all along, left silent slow and sure to lie again in slumber, far between the fields. It had devoured everything it could and splintered what it could not swallow…

After working in civil aviation engineering for so long, Sam Kenney wondered how he would adapt to having his feet on the ground and no particular place to go. Maybe that’s when it started, the drifting apart, the discovery that he and Roxie actually had very little to talk about because there was suddenly so much space to be filled due to his continual presence. Except when it came to their son, grown now and living far afield.

Mom’s been on her phone throughout dinner, not even pretending anymore.
Maya pushes pasta around her plate. When Aurora finally sets the phone down, Maya tries to grab a moment. .
“How’s the data center project?” .
“Mm?” Aurora rubs her eyes. “Fine. Complicated. A lot of moving parts.” .
“When’s the decision?” .
“Soon.” Aurora lifts her fork, then sets it down again. “Don’t wait up tonight. I need to finish the presentation.”

Mairead stopped in the vestibule and slid her hand above the mailboxes to locate the Binaca, once again surprised that no one had discovered her hiding place. She turned to face the street in case Toula from 2G or the super, as her grandmother called him, appeared out of nowhere. She sprayed a quick blast into her mouth, her saliva glands clenching at the sweet mint, then headed up the stairs. She pocketed the Binaca; might as well keep it for later in case Henry showed up at the bonfire.

Hi, Kate. I’m writing this in a campground as the sun sets on a mountain, Tucumcari Mountain. It’s purple! Kevin said it got its name from a Comanche word that means to wait for something to come to you. I’m waiting for Charlie and Kevin to come back from town with pizza!
Kevin gave me this iPad the night before we left Nashville. He bought it with the money he made by . . . well, that’s the reason I’m writing this.

Derek was tired of having nothing to do. Once or twice, he had logged into an online game. What is the use of a game with lousy animation and no music? he was thinking, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes scurried across and out past the left edge of his screen.
There was nothing so very remarkable in that; but because Derek was so intensely bored, he became curious.

I know it wasn’t my imagination. The man held a large sickle with a long handle in his hand. The handle, a sturdy block of wood on which the iron implement was mounted, was longer and bulkier than the usual sickle seen in the hands of women who harvest wheat or rice. Not many people from this posh South Delhi colony would have seen a woman sitting on her haunches to gather the harvest or heard its swish and smelled the freshly cut paddy.

Fog hovers over the treeless valley and the loch. The view is murky through the waves of the old glass pane, like a filter on a camera lens, turning the edges of everything a hazy shade of silver. There’s little daylight remaining. Still, up here the light stays long, and the moon is already out, waxing. Whistling wind sneaks through the small space between the old oak door and the jamb; the fire snaps in the stone hearth, wood smoke mixes with the earthy smell of the room.

I got my first teaching job, of a sort, fifty years ago right after I finished my credentialing program. It was in a two-room schoolhouse on one of the small barrier islands off the Southeastern coast. About a hundred people lived there strewn across its eight square miles along narrow sand and oyster shell roads. Except for the woman who ran the general store/post office and drove the school van, the teacher couple, and me, all of the residents were descendants of escaped slaves.

When Tracy camped at the lake again the following summer, a zipped pocket of her jacket held a tiny silver pendant that was smaller than a dime and bore the whorled imprint of a baby-sized thumb.
Lola’s mother had explained this was a replica of her daughter’s thumbprint. Holding it, she had pressed her own thumb against the concentric ridges for a long moment.

I sat in an antiseptic, white-walled conference room off the main lobby of Sellers & Cross for twenty minutes, fingering the fabric of my charcoal grey suit. It had been a month and a half since I’d seen a paycheck, and I needed to nail this interview. And not just for the money. For a bit of self-respect.
Having to work for a living blows. I never had to work that hard in college.

The garish signage along the road offended him the most. Driving out of his leafy suburb, all Joseph Ward saw was a scrawny forest of concrete and metal stalks holding glaring billboards, miles of cable, and faded plastic light boxes. If there had been another route into the office, he would be driving it.

As a missionary living in Shanghai, my father never imagined his daughter in show business. My mother, on the other hand, aspired for me to become a glamorous movie star once we returned to the states.
“I’ll not have my daughter as a show pony,” Daddy huffed. “It’s not dignified.”

Ever since Ariel visited the archway on the road, she had become completely different, like a woman possessed by a new spirit, and Massimo was grateful for it. He had intuited how precious that space she possessed after her mother died…

Jesse hadn’t been home in fourteen years. He left the night Pat died and hadn’t spoken to his younger brother since. That is until about three weeks ago when Aaron called and asked him to visit. He even bought his ticket.

Marvin came back home from school looking troubled.
“What’s up, man?” Claudia said.
“Hm, I don’t know,” he said, “I just don’t know what the point of everything is.”
Claudia didn’t expect that. Ten-year old Marvin sounded like a nihilist. Wasn’t it a bit too early for that?

Jacob Shigomitsu rubbed a shoulder blade against a rough-barked ʻōhiʻa tree as he worked the kinks out of a lariat and contemplated what to do with his mule. The mule swiveled its enormous furry ears toward Jake and stared back from between the rusty bars of the small pipe-panel corral.
It certainly wasn’t your average mud-gray, slab-sided, undersized Hawaiian scrub mule.

Where have you gone, my dear Ada, apple of my eye, mother of my child, keeper of my love?
Tonight, I returned home to inhuman stillness and silence. When I unlocked the front door and stepped inside, I immediately noticed the house was missing your quiet presence, absent your soulful essence.

“Welcome to the building. Save the boy.”
Nikola heard the words distinctly, but there was no one around. She tightened her grip on her backpack strap and turned back to the message board in the dimly lit průjezd. The passage was chilly and darker than it should have been, as if the winter afternoon light had stopped at the threshold and refused to come further.

Spyder woke to rain chewing the tin roof and the smell of somebody else’s cigarettes. For a second he reached where Teresa used to be, fingers finding only cold sheet and a torn seam he kept promising himself he’d stitch. He lay there and listened until obligation got him upright.
His knees cracked when he swung them off the mattress. Forty-seven and already moving like a hinge in need of oil.

Bridget didn’t believe in love at first sight, but when the pretty girl walked through the door, Bridget would have thought that Cupid himself had stabbed her with a love-laced arrow. It happened quickly, the way things always do when they concern love. Bridget felt the heat rise to her cheeks when, in all her staring, the girl actually stared back. Bridget looked away. She had never seen her before…

As I get home from the dance studio, I see Mom in the kitchen. Cooking. I’m flabbergasted. Why would my mom be cooking? She hates it. My parents had the arrangement that my dad would cook while my mom would clean. Like everything else in this family, it was taken to the extreme.

BR31. 15 hours and 24 minutes. From JFK to TPE. Departs at 1:33 a.m. I’m going back—to see my family, and of course, you.
When I heard your name from my mom on the phone last night, it felt like only yesterday we had lingered after school, as if time would never touch us—we were on your bike, laughing and talking, or in our usual corner beside the banyan tree